As the Directors Guild of America website notes, “founded in 2000, the DGA’s Visual History Program has conducted more than 160 interviews with directors and director’s team members discussing their careers and creative processes in film, television and other media.” These include such luminaries as Agnes Varda, Constantine Costa-Gavras, Claude Lelouch, Robert Altman and many, many others. You can see the interviews by clicking on the image above, and then searching the data base, or clicking on the images of some of the directors featured this month. My friend Dennis Coleman brought this to my attention; many thanks, Dennis! This is is an incredible resource.

For no particular reason, my mind turns this morning towards this underappreciated, but happily available on DVD thriller, set in London, as a Hammer Films /Robert Lippert UK/US co-production. A jazz trumpeter is involved in a murder mystery, and has to clear himself; the film is distinguished by its tough guy dialogue, excellent location shooting in the heart of London’s Soho district, and superb black and white cinematography by the gifted James Harvey. The lead is Alex Nicol, above right, a nice guy who never achieved super stardom, but whom I had the great pleasure of interviewing, and who told truly fabulous stories about old Hollywood; the woman is Eleanor Summerfield, who also never broke through to “A” level status, but who was a reliable leading lady in hardboiled melodramas in the 1940s and 50s.

The Black Glove, titled Face The Music in the UK, is one a of a group of noirs produced by Hammer Films in England during the 1950s, many of which – like this film – were directed by Terence Fisher, who would go on later in his career to become the foremost Gothic filmmaker of the second half of the 20th century with such films as Horror of Dracula (known simply as Dracula in the UK; 1958), the first Dracula film in Technicolor, with a career-defining performance by Christopher Lee as the title character. The Black Glove is certainly less ambitious than Fisher’s later work for Hammer, but it effectively captures the world-weariness of Post War Europe with such dialogue as “this didn’t look like a safe place to take your mother. In fact, it looked like a place you leave horizontally or not at all.”

As Dave Kehr, writing in The New York Times, notes of this film, and Beaudine’s career at Monogram, the 1940s studio where Beaudine did the bulk of his work, “Beaudine was the workhorse of Monogram, signing his name to an astonishing 71 features from 1942 to 1953 [emphasis added]. Although . . . Beaudine had been a prominent silent director [starting out with D.W. Griffith, and later directing Mary Pickford in a series of films, including the highly successful Sparrows (1926)], he seemed to have lost interest in his art by [the 1940s], and most of his films have a generic, disengaged quality . . . Not so this 1946 astonishment, the thoroughly sordid tale of a card shark (the square-jawed serial hero Kane Richmond, cast spectacularly against type) who unhesitatingly betrays pretty much everyone he comes across — including his brother, his female partner and his fiancée — as he takes over a small-town casino somewhere in the Midwest.

Perhaps Beaudine was shaken from his indifference by the strikingly sordid script by the mysterious Caryl Coleman (whose only other credited screenplay [was the equally unrelenting Monogram entry] Wife Wanted) and Harvey Gates (another silent-film veteran who had seen better days); perhaps it is a case of the material’s being perfectly matched to the available means. No major studio of the time would have tolerated the cynicism that courses through this film; nor would a major studio have been capable of capturing the film’s agonizingly expressive shabbiness. In Don’t Gamble With Strangers, Monogram isn’t just a studio — it’s a way of life.”

Along with the equally brutal Black Market Babies, a 1945 Beaudine/Monogram film in which Kane Richmond again appears as a sleazy con man running an “adoption service” with the help of an aging, alcoholic doctor played by Ralph Morgan, Don’t Gamble With Strangers paints a truer picture of post-war American society in the mid 1940s than anything the major studios would touch, as Kehr suggests above. Much of what Beaudine produced is pure junk, and often he simply didn’t care what he was directing, just so long as he got paid – a major force in silent films, Beaudine fell into disfavor after a sojourn in Britain in the late 1930s, and when he returned to Hollywood, found himself unemployable, and deep in debt. But he had to work, so he took anything he could get, and soon was the most prolific director in Hollywood, along with the equally adept Sam Newfield.

Working his way back in at the bottom rung of the studio system, for Monogram or anyone else who would hire him for his flat fee of $500 for six days work – the standard length of time it took him to direct a feature film, working at top speed - Beaudine racked up more than 350 feature films, in addition to television work on such series as the Green Hornet and Lassie – his last major job as a director – before his death at age 78 in 1970. The famous story is often told of a Monogram executive rushing on to the set of one of Beaudine’s films, demanding to know when it would be finished. “You mean there’s someone out there waiting for this?” Beaudine replied, pretty much indicating what he thought of much of the work he was forced to direct by economic necessity. Or, as he told another interviewer, “these films are going to be made regardless of who directs them. There’s a market for them and the studios are going to continue to make them. I’ve been doing this long enough I think I can make them as good or better than anyone else.” And at his best, he absolutely could.

Monogram films in general have frequently been derided for their poor quality sound tracks, indifferent cinematography and lighting, as if the entire film was shot through a gauze filter on outdated film stock, and recorded with the cheapest equipment available. In the pre-digital era, one could always tell a Monogram film by its flat lighting, cheap sets, and distorted soundtrack. But a new series of DVDs from Warner Archive is setting the record straight; earlier viewers were simply being subjected to cheap 16mm prints of the film, while the 35mm masters were as good in terms of pictorial quality as anything turned out by Universal or Republic. These new transfers are literally dazzling, and give a whole new life to Monogram’s output as a whole. It’s a revelation; these are lost films, come back to life at last.

As Foster writes, “while Dorothy Arzner’s Craig’s Wife (1936) revolves around a pathological female who is undone by her desperate attempts to conform to the norms of patriarchy during the depression era, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953) presents us with a male serial killer, another malignant narcissist in Emmett Myers (William Talman) who is similarly desperate to prove his identity and gender through sadistic and sociopathic homicidal behavior. Talman, as Myers, spends most of the movie terrorizing two World War II veterans, Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) and Roy Collins (Edmond O’Brien). He is a serial killer with a chip on his shoulder; he likes to verbally abuse men, keeping them alive just to taunt them. He is not a veteran, and doesn’t have the baggage of a family, or the debts that the men have to support the suburban lifestyle, as he constantly reminds them, but that’s because he lives entirely outside society, preying on it, rather than participating in it.

The key to understanding The Hitch-Hiker is simply asking ourselves why Myers doesn’t just kill the men off at the earliest opportunity. At first he uses them as drivers and he uses them to get food, but as we learn from radio broadcasts, the law has no idea where he is for most of the movie so Myers doesn’t really need these men to survive. Of course it adds to the suspense that he can simply kill them at any time but oddly, he doesn’t kill them. Perhaps he wants them around to admire him and obey him and fulfill his needs as a narcissist? Myers could simply take the car and move on to the next victim, but he actually appears to enjoy trying to come between these two war veterans who themselves are close companions and prefer one another’s company over the company of their wives. Myers may be a serial killer, but he clearly enjoys the company of men. They bring him pleasure.”

The image above shows director Dorothy Arzner on the set of her 1936 film Craig’s Wife, with Director of Cinematography Lucien Ballard at her side. As Foster writes, “it’s instructive to study the work of Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino in context with one another. Though at first glance, one might easily conclude that the only thing they have in common is that they were the only women who managed to direct films during the days of the classical Hollywood studio system, a deeper look into their work exposes a stronger connection between the two; an ability to decimate and undermine the values of home and hearth as they are offered in the union of marriage under the umbrella of capitalism and an expose of the hypocrisy of American gender roles as deeply sociopathic and destructive.

Dorothy Arzner’s bleak “women’s picture” Craig’s Wife (1936) a Depression era adaptation of a stage play – and I’d argue, a feminist horror film – made as a major studio project for Columbia Pictures, revolves around the sociopathy of a destructive female narcissist, while Ida Lupino’s darkly expressionist film The Hitch-Hiker (1953), is based on the true story of male serial killer independently financed, and combines elements of several genres: horror, noir, suspense, the home invasion film and the crime thriller. These films are from different decades and genres, and may seem, at first glance, to have little in common. What I find most interesting and full of critical potential is that both are dominated by sociopaths; characters who suffer from malignant narcissism who act as mirrors held up to America; and both have queer potential.

Though I must stress that they were unique as individuals and had very different directorial styles, Arzner and Lupino remain historically linked by the fact that they were the only two women in the sound era to direct films in Hollywood and the first two women to belong to the Director’s Guild. Women, who had once flourished as film directors in the silent era, had by the sound era been pushed out of the field.Yet, both these filmmakers despised the special attention the media paid to their gender and they were equally vocal about their deep distaste for such attention, even when their uniqueness as female directors was routinely used as a selling point in the studio trades and publicity materials.”

In the essay, I note that “lately I’ve been thinking about black and white movies, and how they’ve almost completely disappeared from the current cinematic landscape. There are occasional projects shot in black and white, but with cinema rapidly becoming an all-digital medium, and black and white film stock almost impossible to purchase, color has taken over completely, either glossy and popped-out, or desaturated for a more dramatic effect, but always using some palette of color. Furthermore, while there have been numerous books on the use of color in the cinema, there has been no book-length study on the black and white film, and yet black and white cinema dominated the industry internationally for nearly seven decades, until the late 1960s.

Certainly, numerous cameramen and directors have weighed in on the use of black and white in their works, most notably John Alton in Painting With Light, but in each case, these works were created when black and white was still a commercially viable medium. Most of the texts I’ve encountered, with the exception of Alton’s book, and to a lesser extent Edward Dmytryk’s Cinema: Concept and Practice, written after the director had long since retired, treat black and white filmmaking as a part of everyday life, the main production medium for most movies, which at the time, it certainly was.

In these necessarily practical books, it’s about f-stops, filters and cookies, but very little about the aesthetics of the medium. Indeed, when Alton published his landmark study, he was famously excoriated by his colleagues as being a pretentious self-promoter; what cameramen did was work, nothing more, and any notions of artistic ambition were inherently suspect. In most of the books cited below, color is dealt with as a special case, which again, it was; but now, in the all color, all digital world of images we currently inhabit, black and white has become the anomaly. Thus, I wanted to set down some preliminary notes on my new project here, before they elude me; the title is Black and White: A Brief History of Monochrome Cinema, the term used by British filmmakers until the medium’s demise in the mid 1960s.

And yet shooting in black and white is inherently a transformative act. As the filmmaker and opera director Jonathan Miller – whose beautiful film of Alice in Wonderland (1966) was elegantly photographed in black and white by the gifted Dick Bush – once observed in a conversation with me, the very act of making a black and white film transmutes the original source material, for life, as we know, takes place in color. Therefore, there is an intrinsic level of stylization and re-interpretation of reality when one makes a black and white film, leading to an entirely different way of cinematography. Indeed, it’s an entirely different world altogether, one that is rapidly slipping away from us as it recedes in the mists of the past.”

As the journal’s mission statement notes, in part, “Film Internationalcovers film culture as part of the broader culture, history and economy of society. We address topics of contemporary relevance from historically informed perspectives. We wish to bridge the gap between the academy and the outside world, and encourage the participation of scholars from a variety of disciplines, as well as journalists, freelance writers, activists and film-makers.

We refuse the facile dichotomies of ‘high’ and ‘low’, Hollywood and independent, art and commercial cinema. We discuss Hollywood films seriously, and ‘art’ movies critically. We aim at becoming a truly international journal, recognising local specificities, but also the ultimate interconnectedness of an increasingly globalised world.”

FI covers international film, Hollywood film, independent cinema, and everything else in between. It features reviews, interviews, and festival reports on a regular basis, and has an egalitarian spirit which allows all critical voices to be heard, without forcing any of the writers to adhere to a particular philosophical, political, or artistic school of thought.

Commercial cinema, radical cinema, the past, present and future of the medium all meet in the pages of FI, which is absolutely free for online use with just the click of a button. I regularly contribute to FI, but I also savor the contents provided by all of the other writers for the journal, and I constantly find that FI discusses those films that other journals simply pass over, giving a well rounded perspective on the current cinema scene.

A Farewell to Arms – Free – Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes star in film based on famous novel by Ernest Hemingway. (1932)A Matter of Life and Death – Free – Romantic fantasy film created by the British writing-directing-producing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and set in England during the Second World War. It stars David Niven, Roger Livesey, Kim Hunter, Marius Goring and Raymond Massey. (1946)A Star is Born – Free – Janet Gaynor portrays Esther Blodgett, a starry-eyed small town girl dreams of making it in Hollywood. (1937)Adventures of Robinson Crusoe – Free – The classic novel by Daniel Defoe gets adapted by the great Luis Buñuel. (1954)Alexander Nevsky – Free – A historical drama film directed by the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. (1938)An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge – Free – French short film directed by Robert Enrico; a hit at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Awards. (1962)Andrei Rublev – Free – Andrei Tarkovsky’s film charting life of the great icon painter. Click CC for subtitles. Part 2 here. (1966)Angel on My Shoulder – Free – A gangster comedy starring Claude Rains and Paul Muni. (1946)As You Like It – Free – It’s Laurence Olivier’s earliest Shakespeare performance on film. (1936)Becky Sharp – Free – The first feature film to use three-strip Technicolor film, or, put differently, the first real color film. (1935).Bottle Rocket – Free – Wes Anderson’s first short film, which became the basis for his first feature film by the same name. (1992)Breaking the Code – Free – A biography of the English mathematician Alan Turing, who was one of the inventors of the digital computer and one of the key figures in the breaking of the Enigma code. Stars Derek Jacobi. (1996)Cannibal! The Musical – Free – Black comedy by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the makers of South Park. (1993)Captain Kidd – Free – Charles Laughton and John Carradine star in film with drama on the high seas (1945).Castello Cavalcanti – Free – Wes Anderson’s short film takes place in a hamlet tucked away somewhere in Italy. Features Jason Schwartzman, star of Anderson’s 1998 breakout Rushmore. (2013)Charade – Free – Starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Part romance, comedy and thriller, this public domain film has been called “the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made. (1963)Chimes at Midnight - Free – Directed by Orson Welles, the film focuses on Shakespeare’s recurring character Sir John Falstaff and his relationship with another character Prince Hal. (1966)Cold Sweat – Free – Charles Bronson, Liv Ullman, James Mason, and Jill Ireland star in this action packed movie about a ruthless drug runner who holds a man’s family hostage. (1970)Cyrano De Bergerac – Free – Michael Gordon’s film based on the classic French tale. (1950)Darwin – Free – 53-minute exploration of the life and work of Charles Darwin by Peter Greenaway. (1993)Diary – Free – Short film by Tim Hetherington (director of Restrepo) that reflects on his ten years of war reporting. (2010)Doodlebug – Free – One of Christopher Nolan’s early short films. Made in 1997, released in 2003.Dreams That Money Can Buy – Free – A surrealist film by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger & Hans Richter. (1947)Duet for Cannibals – Free – A tale of emotional cannibalism by Susan Sontag. A pair of psychological & sexual cannibals come close to devouring a younger couple. (1969)Eat, Sleep & Kiss – Free – Three silent anti-films by Andy Warhol. (1963-1964)Evidence – Free – From the maker of Koyaanisqatsi, a short film about kids watching cartoons (1995).Fear and Desire – Free – An uncut print of Stanley Kubrick’s “lost” early film. (1953)Five Minutes to Live – Free – Amazing bank heist movie stars Johnny Cash, Vic Tayback, Ron Howard, and Merle Travis. (1961)Flamenco at 5:15 – Free – Oscar-winning short film about a flamenco dance class given to senior students. (1983)and many more.

Audrey Totter, one of the great noir stars of the screen in the 1940s, has died; as Matt Schudel noted in The Washington Post, “Totter, an actress who specialized in playing temptresses, dangerous dames and women harboring dark schemes in a series of movies from Hollywood’s film noir period of the 1940s and ’50s, died Dec. 12 at a hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 95. She had congestive heart failure after a stroke, her daughter, Mea Lane, said.

Miss Totter first set the screen afire with a small but sizzling part in the 1946 noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice [. . .] Over the next several years, Miss Totter was in demand as one of Hollywood’s sexiest and most alluring actresses, often playing cynical and malevolent women who, in the words of film historian Eddie Muller, ‘had a heart as big and warm as an ice cube.’ [. . .]

‘For years nobody bothered with me — didn’ t know who I was, didn’t care,’ she told the Toronto Star in 2000. ‘Now I’m recognized on the street, I’m asked for my autograph, I get loads of fan mail. Who knew these movies would be so popular 50 years later? Maybe it’s because the world isn’t like that anymore. The fantasy of it. They painted with light in those days, it’s a look that just isn’t done anymore.”

She acted in radio dramas before going to Hollywood and signing on as a contract player with MGM. After film noir began to fade in the 1950s, she acted in westerns and television, including a recurring role as a nurse on Medical Center in the 1970s. Miss Totter’s final acting role came in 1987, when she appeared on an episode of Angela Lansbury’s Murder, She Wrote. She continued to receive offers but seldom found anything that appealed to her.

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of thirty books and more than 100 articles on film, and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. To contact Prof. Dixon for an interview, reach him at 402.472.6064 or wdixon1@unl.edu. Visit him at his website, wheelerwinstondixon.com